RS

FRONT PAGE CONTRIBUTOR

Would every non-anti-Semitic donor to UCLA please watch this video?

(Via Powerline) It’d probably be a good thing if said donors knew what their money is paying for. Short version: UCLA has an Undergraduate Students Association: the association has a judicial board. A sophomore named Rachel Beyda was under consideration for the board. Everyone agreed that she was qualified… and then half of those people qualified that admission with a ‘but.’

You can see where this is going, right?

Yup. Ms. Beyda is a Jew. Worse – from the original point of view of the board (Ms. Beyda was eventually confirmed, as soon as the Association’s adult faculty minder noticed that s/he was letting his/her charges do stupid things in public, which is precisely what said minder was there to prevent from happening) – they felt that the Jewish groups that Ms. Beyda belonged to might be biased, which to me sounds like they weren’t anti-Israeli enough to suit the Association.

I’m not particularly exaggerating any of this, by the way. As Powerline noted, according to the above video the only reason being given to oppose the young woman in question was that she was a Jew. If that isn’t clear from the video, here’s an admittedly partisan recounting of events from a friend of Ms. Beyda. All in all, everyone generally agrees that this incident reflects badly on UCLA, and well it should.

But that’s not why donors should reassess their charitable impulses. The reason why donors should reassess their charitable impulses is because nobody got fired for teaching these kids to be prejudiced against Jews. What, did you think that they learned it on their own? Nope! They’ve been soaking up nonsense about divided loyalties* from their professors (and, possibly even more terrifyingly, from campus administrators); one can hardly be surprised that said nonsense is going to be, ah, expressed in stressful moments.

Those of you who don’t have a problem with this, by all means: spread around your money how you like. This is a free country, after all. But if you do have a problem with this… well.

PS: We will now pause while someone who none of us has ever heard of before – and never will hear from again – posts a twenty paragraph post earnestly (possibly, even desperately) trying to convince us all that Ms. Beyda was lucky to even be considered for that position. Or at least tries to. Because that’s how this sort of thing usually goes.

*This is sort of the reductio ad absurdum of the divided loyalties smear, in fact. If the International Zionist Conspiracy really is capable of drilling down all the way to a college student judicial board, then we might as well all give up and start sending the IZC our timesheets.